


Not Broken, Just Battered

by j_gabrielle



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Loras Tyrell - Freeform, Margaery Tyrell - Freeform, Renly Baratheon - Freeform, Robb Stark - Freeform, Roose Bolton - Freeform, Talisa Maegyr - Freeform, Theon Greyjoy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-14 07:38:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/834353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_gabrielle/pseuds/j_gabrielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She hears him get up, coming towards her and she has to swallow back the bile of panic high in her throat."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Broken, Just Battered

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from 'Just Give Me A Reason' by Pink ft. Nate Ruess
> 
>  
> 
> This kinda got away from me. I apologise.
> 
>  
> 
> *headdesk*

Thea does not look up at the door slam, used as she is to the signal of Robb’s coming and goings. She lifts her brush absently in greeting; hearing rather than seeing him drop his briefcase on the battered leather sofa.

“Hey.” He murmurs, pressing a kiss to the side of her head and she hums in reply. The painting in front of her is not going to spontaneously finish itself and she has her first gallery showing in a little over two months. Granted, it isn’t a big famous gallery like the ones downtown, but this one is nice and the curator genuinely likes her work, and that’s good enough for her.

“How did it go today?” She asks as Robb shucks his work shirt over the head of the sofa, mussing his slicked back dark hair. He had a meeting with the Lannister people and Thea has had to suffer through him ranting (and panicking) about it for the past week and half. She is curious to hear how it went.

Robb groans, low and drawn out. Bad then, Thea winces.

Turning back to her art, she reconsiders. Perhaps some ideas were better left for the morning.

Dropping the brush in her hand into a glass jar of multi-coloured water, she climbs to straddle him, tucking a stray curl of her ginger hair as she goes. “Want me to make you feel better?” She puts on a smile, draping herself over Robb’s half-naked form. His ensuing grin is wicked and mischievous, and all the answer she needs.

 

* * *

 

Robb is her best friend from the moment she hit him with a mud cake when he was seven and she was eight. He was her rock when her father got carted off to prison for racketeering when she was 13, and the subsequent estrangement from the rest of the Greyjoy clan afterwards.

Robb went from the kid following a bossy older girl, to the boy that held said bossy older girl when she was worried that she would die from all the blood that did not seem to stop gushing out from between her legs.

(They were sleeping over in his childhood room with the paper model planes strung from the ceiling. After that, Catelyn Stark always told her to sleep with her daughters)

He’s… He, Robb Stark, is her everything and she means it in the way she rarely means anything else. Thea can honestly swear that she can remember little of her childhood, but the things that she does is all filled with Robb.

He doesn’t know it, and he will never know if Thea has any say about it, but he was also her first kiss.

She had made it out like she had already done it with all these other boys in her class, but when a fierce spark bloomed in Robb’s eyes and he’d pull her close to press their lips together in a clash of teeth and flesh that left both of them bleeding and in pain. They had had many opportunities to perfect their techniques, but it’s the first times that stayed with you, right?

Thea has never been a point of pride with her family, and she is not about to start anytime soon. She’d moved out of the Greyjoy household the day she turned 16, wandering the streets for hours and ignoring every phone call from Robb.

It’s then that she met Ramsay Bolton.

Robb had asked her about him after they started sleeping together, his fingers tracing the ugly scars on her ribs and arms. All she could answer him with is a stony silence and a quick retreat to her own bed.

She stayed with Ramsay until she got her letters for Uni, managing to keep every thing that happened in his little council estate flat a secret from everyone and Robb. The moment she packed her bags that day to leave for London in Robb and Jon’s car, she swore that she would never speak of the things that happened in that flat with the mould in the ceiling and the peeling floral wallpaper.

Thea and Robb started sleeping together around their second year of Uni. They were both sober and it was consensual. She can’t help the trembling of her shoulders when he touched her, but if he had noticed that she kept the curtains shut tight and the room in almost pitch black darkness, he doesn’t speak of it.

The flat that the three of them share is comfortably sized and a short distance from campus. Jon takes the car more often than not, and Robb gets a bicycle. Thea gets a job working in the bookstore three bus stops down. They slave over their assignments and various requirements needed to pass their courses, stretching 24 hour days into 36 hour one, operating on very little sleep and copious amounts of caffeine, and that was student life.

Jon left his things behind after he graduated, and taking off for a gap year in Iceland that has turned into three. So, it was just Robb and Thea in the flat with a pet rock on the windowsill named Winston.

 

* * *

 

Their little fuck-buddy situation is a convenient one. For Robb, it is doing it with someone who won’t go selling their story to the tabloids the morning after. For Thea, it was because she has never quite trusted any other man the way she has trusted him.

Besides, who wants to touch a girl with scars littering her torso, a girl who wears baggy tee shirts and oversized plaid button-ups that drown her skinny frame.

Hence, the perfect situation for their fuck-buddy situation.

And Thea does not need anything more than that. Nope, not a single thing.

 

* * *

 

She’s only ever good for sex. No one has ever wanted anything else from her.

 

* * *

 

It is raining on the day that _IT_ happens. She’d missed the last bus from the gallery, and had to walk home on foot in the rain. By the time Thea had gotten home, all she wanted was a nice hot bath and perhaps a cuddle with Robb.

What happens is this:

Thea gets home and hears the musical notes of a woman’s laughter. She opens the door and Robb is on the sofa with his arm wrapped around a pretty brunette. The two empty wine-bottles on the coffee table is evident in the dimmed lights of the flat and the little candles that had magically appeared on all flat surfaces not near to anything flammable.

And Sade floods the place with her ‘Smooth Operater’, also known as ‘Robb’s Sex Song’.

Robb is all-focused on the giggling girl beside him, laughing along in a languid happy carefree way that she has not seen in a long, long time.

Thea doesn’t stick around to see if they noticed her, doesn’t stick around to put much thought to the stabbing pain in her heart.

 

* * *

 

There was once when she was Thea with the long curly hair that tumbled down her shoulders like waves of a waterfall, once when she wore pretty sundresses, floral perfumes and bright glossy lipsticks. It was a long, long time ago, but Thea was once the girl that laughs without the shadows in her voice

 

* * *

 

Robb introduces her the morning after. He’s at the stove flipping pancakes and she’s in his old ratty band tee sitting in Thea’s chair at the breakfast counter.

“This is Talisa. Talisa, meet Thea.” Said simply, dark eyes not even looking at her. ( _Look at me, look only at me_ ) Talisa is beautiful in a model-esque way, soft in a way a woman is supposed to be. Her long dark hair is sleep mussed and she smiles at Robb in a way that tells Thea that she is going to be around for awhile (perhaps forever).

Thea nods at her, all hunger dissipating into an overwhelming need to throw up. Good thing she’s dressed, because she grabs her spare canvases and hightails it out of the flat in record time.

 

* * *

 

Talisa is becoming more of a permanent feature in their flat, and Thea comes back each time to find that she is becoming a stranger in her own home. Robb doesn’t seek her out, and it is obvious that whatever they had between them was over.

Thea feels a big part of her die inside every time she sees them together.

The worse part is that she doesn’t want to force him to choose, that she knows which way his decision will fall.

Talisa is perfect and made for Robb to love.

No one will ever pick her.

 

* * *

 

She does not come home one night.

Nor the next night.

It is five days before Robb calls.

 

* * *

 

“Where did you go?” He asks when she steps through the door, making her jump. Robb is nothing but a shadowy figure in the far end of the room that Thea prays silently will not come near. She clenches and unclenches her hand, willing it to stop shaking. The last week was more of a blur, and she doesn’t remember anything besides the pain from the new bouquet of bruises on her ribs and the throbbing burn of the thin stripes on her back.

It is dark in the flat; the only light source is the lamp by the sofa. Nervous, Thea shifts her messenger bag in front of her, propping her art supplies against the wall. “No where. Just got caught up.” She mumbles, looking down at her feet.

She hears him get up, coming towards her and she has to swallow back the bile of panic high in her throat.

Robb reaches a hand out, and it happens like this; she drops to a crouch, begging in a stream of words that she doesn’t recognise, covering her face, the burn of bitter tears obscuring her vision.

“Thea! THEA!”

Robb is in front of her, eyes wide, fearful. Instinctively, she pushes him away, bolting for her room. The litany of ‘please don’t hurt me’, ‘I’ll do what you want’ does not stop even when she buries herself under her covers.

The ringing in her ears, the pleas on her lips to a monster in the shadows drowns out the muffled “What happened to you Thea?” from outside her door.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t see much of Robb in the days that follow. And soon, it is the day of her first gallery showing.

Margaery, the gallery owner comes by the day before, takes one look at her and drags her out to the boutiques that line High Street and proceeds to dress her.

“I-I don’t think this would look good on me…” Thea tries, wobbling a little in heels that she has not worn in a very long time. The fact that Margaery takes one look at her scars and fading bruises, and does not flinch or ask about them puts Thea only slightly at ease with her.

“Nonsense.” She waves, elegant hands coming up to her shoulders. “Every woman will want to look like you by the end of the night.” She smiles.

Thea tries to refuse again, stating that she wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of the earrings alone, only to be tutted into silence.

“If you look good, my gallery looks good. Besides,” Margaery grins, “I always like dressing up pretty girls in beautiful things that show just how beautiful they really are.” There is something behind her words, in the way her eyes held Thea’s in the mirror. It makes Thea a little more than grateful and whole lot of terrified, but she manages a smile that feels more real than the ones she has given in the past five years.

 

* * *

 

There is whole throng of people that night, and everyone wants to talk to Thea.

All it does is making her want to hide under her covers again. People make her nervous, especially all these people looking at her paintings.

She entertains the people buying her art, lets the journos jolt down her words, and basks in the approving light in Margaery’s eyes. It is a success, she is told by Renly the curator who is incidentally Margaery’s brother’s boyfriend. It doesn’t matter to her either way. She is just quietly happy that it has gone well.

“Did someone buy this?” She asks, coming to stand in front of a portrait of Robb she’d done while he slept. His eyes are closed, serene in his repose. Thea had been hoping that this one, out of all her babies, would have been left unbought.

Renly quirks an eyebrow at it, squinting at the tablet in his hands. “Yeah. Some bloke put down a good offer for it just a minute ago.”

“Oh.”

She tries not to sound disappointed, but she thinks she is not fooling anyone. “Do you want me to talk to him?” Renly whispers, leaning in close. Thea takes one last look at the portrait, steeling herself.

“No. It’s… It’s fine.” She says softly. Renly pats her shoulder, and moves to talk to a stern faced gentleman and his companion appraising her work about the boats in the port.

Scanning the crowd one last time, Thea takes out her phone, checking the home screen. No calls, no messages. Blinking away the tears that burn the corners of her eyes, remembering something about smudging her make-up, she goes outside, relishing the feel of the cool night air filling her lungs.

Robb hasn’t come tonight, even though he had to know that this was the most important thing to her. It makes her just a little sad, a little angry, but resigned. He has made it clear.

Sentimentality had never helped anyone, and most certainly not her. Robb has been the focus of her universe for so long that it is becoming harder to remember who she is without Robb. Talisa and he were obviously getting more serious with each other, and she has to wonder about why Talisa has never voiced her displeasure at them living together.

No matter. It is an end of something for Thea, and she basks in the mourning in her bones.

“Thea? You alright?” Margaery stands next to her, face illuminated a dark yellow by the streetlamps.

She thinks on her answer for awhile. “No, I’m not.” She admits, before continuing. “But I will be.” Margaery smiles briefly before turning back into the party.

 

* * *

 

Thea moves out a few days later, amazed by the fact that she has only accumulated enough possession to fit into a moving van Renly had kindly called for her. She has lived here for almost a decade and all she has managed to hold onto is Robb isn’t home when she leaves, so she places an envelope of cash that will cover her half of the rent for the month, a list of numbers for the plumber and electrician on the dining table. After a brief moment of indecision, she takes Winston with her.

Her new place is nothing more than a studio, but it is hers. Renly and his boyfriend Loras gives her the mattress by the window and they enlist the help of some of the gallery workers to moving her things up the flights of stairs.

Margaery takes charge, ordering the positions of furniture and the setting up of her workspace by the other big window in the room.

“Thank you.” She says to each and every one of them afterwards, feeling a tender coil of happiness at the way those big burly men smile and blush at her gratitude.

After a dinner of pizza, beers and Coke, Thea retreats to the fire escape, watching the million flickering lights of the city below her.

“Why are they so nice to me?” Thea asked out loud, knowing that Margaery is listening by the window.

“Because you’re a lost puppy. And everyone likes being nice to lost puppies. They’re cute.”

Thea snorts, rolling her half empty can between her palms. “I don’t want to be lost anymore.” She says in a small voice. “But I think… I’m scared to be found.”

The other woman does not say anything, only comes out to sit next to her in the cramped space. “I think you need to be brave. And let people in here,” She points a manicured nail to her chest, “And let us help you.”

Thea feels a rush of gratitude towards her in that moment, but she ducks her head, smiling.

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

It is a full year before she sees Robb again.

Thea wants to say that it is a total accident, but it really isn’t. She is going to the supply shop having run out of paints of a certain hue, when she hears her name called in the busy street.

“You look different.” Robb says slowly, as if admitting something surprising to himself.

“Thanks.” Thea tucks her hair behind her ear. It is longer now, and she knows that she will never leave it any longer past her shoulders, but it is a healthy length curling just below her ears.

Robb tucks his hands into his jeans, and God… He looks good. Thea hasn’t stopped to miss him, what with the whirlwind of commissions, and the visits to the psychiatrist that she has consented to see every Thursday afternoon. She is healing, slowly but surely.

“How have you been?” They both ask at the same time, and they have to stop, bursting into laughter at the cliché they have stepped into.

Robb smiles, and there is a softness in his eyes, something sad too. “I’ve been good. Talisa and I broke it off awhile back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Thea offers, though she cannot deny the sudden picking up of her heartbeat at the confession. Robb quirks his eyebrow at her words, but does not say a thing.

They stand there facing each other as the crowds ebb and flow pass them. “I waited for you to call.” He says shortly, “I… I found out. About Ramsay.”

Before, the mere mention of his name would send Thea into a spin of darkness and blur of reliving those memories in that house. Now it merely makes her lips thin in displeasure.

“That’s…”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

That surprised her, as did the forlorn look in his eyes. It must have shown in her face because he bites his lip before continuing, “I wish I’d known before... I tried telling myself that you had a reason for not telling me…”

“I did.” Thea cuts in, “But if you’d like,” She pauses a moment, digging into her bag for her sketchpad. Scribbling down her address, she passes it to him. “I am ready to talk about it. To you.”

Robb swallows, the corners of his lips curling up. “I’d really like that.”

Thea smiles.

 

 

[end.]


End file.
